The Anticipatory Backgrounds in Classic Political Culture Theory. Why Would It Matter?

Reflections on political participation

Abstract

The classic political culture theory is essentially concerned with the issue of political participation. Political culture theory is addressed as theoretical, methodological, and empirical support to the study of the relationship between the citizens and the state (polity). The idea of this approach is to define both the citizen’s attitude and the polity as anticipatory systems as they could be considered communication systems from the perspective of Luhmann’s system theory (Luhmann, 1995, 2012). As such, political attitude and polity are viewed as structurally coupled systems: each of them contains a model of the other, and each is the environment of the other. Moreover, each of them consists of multiple (functionally differentiated) subsystems. Political culture theory might represent the root of new science, a science of participation, which might re-unite humans and non-humans into a new conceptual and techniqual milieu. The conceptual and pragmatic roots of a science of participation lie in the core conceptual construction of the classic political culture theory. The citizens and the state dynamically build-up a coupling relationship whose complexity is what pertains to ‘political participation’. Some reflections are included about political culture theory and political participation.